I budget most of my social networking time for Google Buzz. Here’s my long-winded why…

Facebook support waivers and A list bloggers like Mashable speculate about the fate of MySpace, but nobody seems to be reporting on Google Buzz. Sure, it faltered out of the gate with a privacy misstep. To briefly recap: users were set to auto-follow their Gmail contacts and those auto-follows could be seen by other Buzz users. However, this was done inadvertently and the problem was patched faster than a speeding bullet. This issue was addressed quite well at SXSW. Google apologized. (It differs significantly from Facebook intentionally taking what was previously private and unapologetically broadcasting it to the entire 400 million plus Facebook community but that’s another post altogether.) Now, in case you were wondering, Buzz doesn’t have any known privacy bugs. You can buzz publicly or privately. You can show or hide your list of people you follow and people who follow you. Has anyone in the media or blogosphere been reporting on this?

To me, this is what makes Google Buzz appealing and more so than competing social networks:

• Building a Buzz environment to your liking: It is easy to build followers and to reciprocate follows. My Google Buzz followers are largely active Buzz users. I have more Google Buzz followers than Twitter followers and I joined Twitter ages ago. I enjoy both reading and writing on Buzz.
• Twitter falls short: Twitter is often difficult to follow. Conversations, which rarely develop, need to be decrypted because of the 140 character limit and the lack of meaningful organization of Tweets. It doesn’t help matters that many active Twitter users tend to be get-rich-quick schemes and pure follow-back whores.
• Facebook is a different animal: Facebook isn’t really about expanding horizons. Sure, I like keeping in touch with people and Facebook makes that easy. I suggest you ask yourself these questions if you think Facebook is the be-all-end-all of social networks: How many new people have you met on Facebook? How many real conversations have you engaged in on Facebook? What is the signal to noise ratio on Facebook? Are you content with Facebook governance and frequent changes in policy?
• The Buzz platform is well designed. Sharing information from Google Reader, YouTube and by URL has never been easier. We are expecting to see the Buzz API opened up at Google I/O which should benefit the platform and accelerate Buzz growth.
• Community support and mobilization: We’ve taught each other how to use Buzz and some conventions for Buzz use have developed. We’ve mobilized to support Buzz and provided feedback to the Google Buzz Team. The Google Buzz Team has responded with improvements and is currently privately beta testing new features.
• Buzz is a community. I have met new people near and far (very far) and joked, shared opinions and debated. Buzz users have engaged and thoroughly discussed many topics. My posts and ideas have generated more discussion on Google Buzz than any other platform. I’m not alone in this regard; other people report the same. It’s nice to have feedback every once in a while from a diverse group of people.

Buzz is social media at its finest! If you were scared off by the privacy glitch and haven’t experienced Buzz recently, you’re doing yourself a disservice. Give Buzz a second chance.

If you haven’t jumped on the bandwagon and played around on Google Buzz, you haven’t missed much. I’ll tell you what’s been going on the past few days. It seems like almost all of the buzz is about Buzz. This isn’t exactly a bad thing, however; Google employees have been working around the clock to respond to user feedback with improvements, according to the Official Gmail blog. Many of the improvements relate to online privacy and the auto-follow feature (which is now an auto-suggest feature).

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Here I gripe about Google Buzz…

I believe that Google Buzz has a lot of potential and I’m digging it.  However, it has some kinks that need to be worked out:

1. Notifications should skip the Gmail inbox by default. We can see the notifications in the left-hand pane and don’t need to intermingle buzz with email. Filters can be used to route the buzz to archives and skip the inbox (instructions courtesy of LifeHacker at http://goo.gl/3Iyt) but it would make more sense to have a toggle whether the user wants buzz in the inbox.
2. Kudos to Google for making responses to buzzes (which work like comments on a blog) editable. However, it would be really nifty if the buzz responses were (a) nested and (b) could be hidden. Many popular buzzes have so many comments that it’s almost impossible to follow the conversation. The clutter on the page is overwhelming too.
3. The “Mute” button doesn’t work. Be warned: If you mute a buzz you commented on, then new replies will all show up in your new buzz count. Because the mute button doesn’t work, long discussions like the ones Mashable started are to be avoided.
4. The “Mute” button is dangerously close to the “Unfollow” button.
5. Let us harvest our Facebook friends list and add them in buzz. While I appreciate the efforts to avoid mentioning Facebook anywhere and not link to it, the ability to draw in our existing social networks would be helpful. Pulling in Twitter followers simply doesn’t cut it for many of us.

I’m actually kind of digging buzz but the issues I identified above need to be addressed ( at least 1 through 4) or this ship won’t sail.

P.S. Mini-Gripe: Couldn’t Google add some more background/color themes to Gmail? The existing ones get mighty boring.